Hey folks,

2026 is going to be a big year for Ostranauts! We talked a little bit about the future of the game in the 2025 Year in Review post, but we wanted to discuss our plans in more detail here.

• New ship weapons, sensors, and hulls

• Fire and smoke

• 3 new stations around Ceres

• New Plot around Ceres

• New small arms: Combat Rifle, HG Rifle, Shotgun

• Asteroid mining around Ceres

• Unity 6 port/Better performance

• Add emotional statbars to main HUD

• Steam Workshop

• Steam Cloud Saves

• SteamDeck improvements

• Captain/Crew skills improve ship weapon ranges and fuel efficiency

• Emotional clobber events have more variety, and more interactive

• Replace placeholder maps on other stations in the Solar System

• New EVA and Pressure suits

• Improved modding support

• Steam Achievements

• Bug Fixes

• Polish and quality of life changes

We are committing to Steamworks support for 1.0 launch. We want players to be able to take advantage of modding tools to tweak their experience to their liking. With just a text editor and pixel art tool, it should be possible to edit items, characters, plots, maps, recipes, and even the star system itself!

Plus, some clever players are figuring out even more sophisticated mods to such things as crew AI, character creation, and even UI changes.

We plan to continue supporting Ostranauts after 1.0, with more bug fixes, polish, and potentially even new content. Over the course of development, we've collected a large list of ideas that were beyond the game's original scope, both from players and our own desires.

The success of Ostranauts will have an impact. If Ostranauts suddenly becomes a massive hit, it'll be a pretty strong case for us dedicating more resources towards making it bigger and better. Or if it isn't very popular, we may have to scale back.

Either way, though, we don't see 1.0 as the end of Ostranauts's development. Merely a signal to potential customers that Ostranauts has reached the end of what we promised in our original Roadmap.

In preparation for Fire in the Hold, we’ve been working on a combat testing build, called Arena Mode, where you can pick out a preset ship and jump right into combat. Or you can edit a preset, or even make your own from scratch!

From there, you'll be attacked by endless waves of increasingly difficult ships. It's up to you and your ship design to last as long as possible.

When you're defeated, you'll receive an after action report, and score, depending on how many waves of enemies you survive, how much damage you caused, and how expensive your ship was. This should be a great way to get some low-risk practice with designing and piloting ships in combat, for those who want to engage with that system in the upcoming milestone.

You can check out Arena Mode by accessing the arena_mode branch, which can be done by following the instructions here.

We’ve also created a text guide which explains how to play Arena Mode and how to engage in ship combat: 

Arena Mode Guide

So strap-in to your flight seats! Power-on your NAV systems! (Maybe pack an extra fire extinguisher!) And go get 'em!

We can't wait to see what you come up with for ship designs, and how far they can get.

Happy new year, everyone!

After restful holidays, the team here at BBG is back at work, getting Ship Combat ready. And I wanted to take a few minutes to look back at what we've been up to, and what's next.

For the first half of 2025, our work primarily focused on hardening the game. Each build, we would reevaluate which issues players were having most, and worked on fixes and features to alleviate them. This could be bug fixes, UI changes, performance optimization, new features, or other quality of life enhancements.

During that time, we gradually ramped-up our focus on new work for our final milestone, Fire in the Hold (v0.15). And as the year came to a close, we were nearly full-time on that milestone, only pausing to fix issues when they particularly disrupted players of the live patch.

Here's what that looked like, as a timeline:

Red lines are major updates, with new features and content. Orange lines are smaller features and significant fixes. And yellow lines are hotfixes, primarily addressing bugs players found.

The infographic also has blue lines for each of the major devlog and preview posts we made, plus green sections for when Ostranauts was on discount.

As you can see, 2025 was a pretty busy year! So busy, in fact, that we ended up postponing our release of Fire in the Hold to 2026.

And that brings us to the second part of this post.

While we weren't able to release Fire in the Hold in 2025, we did manage to get it into closed beta. And if you follow my Bsky account[bsky.app] at all, you've probably seen a few of the screenshots coming from testers over the past few weeks.

Here are a few highlights from testing so far:

Figure 1: a revised OKLG with 3 docking ports, and one is occupied by an Ibex modified to carry a small craft docked in its own central docking port.

Figure 2: Retrofitting a police Vector Mk III with sensors, PDC, and mass thrower.

Figure 3: Ship Combat Shot and Hit Indicators

Figure 4: Smoke and Contaminant Alarms

Figure 5: Debris from a ship scuttling in an asteroid field.

Figure 6: Sensor view of a derelict wreck embedded in some asteroids.

Figure 7: Stray fire from a nearby ship battle, with asteroids and a beacon nearby.

Figure 8: Sprites for some new ship weapon types.

As you can see, there are a lot of moving parts in 0.15! Aside from ship combat and fire, there are customizable NAV stations, asteroids and mining, and even new possible ship designs with multiple docking ports.

The plan from here is to continue the closed 0.15 beta as we fix bugs and adjust balance issues. And once that is in a state where it's stable and entertaining, we'll push the patch to public_test for the rest of Steam players to try out.

At that point, the game will be feature and content complete, and the primary focus will be on stability, quality of life, performance, and general polish as we approach 1.0. Our hope is that we can achieve this in early 2026. Though, as history has shown us, our predictions can be wrong!

As always, if you have any questions or other feedback, we're keen to hear it! The best place to post is as a reply to this Steam announcement, which we'll monitor for at least a few days. But we also keep an eye on our Discord[discord.gg] and comments to our Reddit posts. Thanks for reading, and we hope you all have a prosperous 2026!

Best,

Daniel Fedor

Founder, Blue Bottle Games, LLC